Rangers Blast Four HRs, Rout Mariners 10-5 Behind Jansen's Four RBI
Texas hit four home runs and scored in five different innings to beat Seattle 10-5 on Wednesday. Danny Jansen led the way with a 2-for-4 night, a homer, and 4 RBI, while Nicky Lopez went a perfect 3-for-3 with an RBI.
The Rangers wasted no time. Corey Seager opened the scoring with a 418-foot shot to right in the first, and Texas kept building from there — a Lopez single plated Langford in the second, then a Justin Foscue single to center scored two more in the fourth to push it to 4-0. It looked like a runaway. Then Lazaro Montes happened. With two runners on in the bottom of the fourth, Montes crushed a 474-foot three-run homer to center that pulled Seattle to within one, swinging the home win probability from 12% to 35%. For a moment, the Mariners had life.
Texas answered immediately and decisively. Wyatt Langford led off the fifth with a 438-foot two-run shot to left center, restoring a three-run cushion. Then, in the same inning, Jansen unloaded a 391-foot three-run homer to left center — Burger and Lopez both scored — and just like that it was 9-3. The story of the night was that fifth inning: two home runs, five runs, and the game effectively over before Seattle could blink. Jansen added a run-scoring single in the seventh to make it 10-3, and that was the ballgame in everything but the final score.
Cal Quantrill did his job on the mound, going 6.0 innings and allowing 3 earned runs on 5 hits with 4 strikeouts — a workmanlike outing that gave Texas exactly what it needed. Bryce Miller, on the other hand, couldn't survive the fourth, exiting after 3.2 innings having allowed 4 earned runs on 4 hits and 3 walks. Seattle's late-inning cosmetics — a Canzone RBI double in the eighth and an Arozarena sacrifice fly in the ninth — trimmed the final margin to 10-5, but this one was never really in doubt after Jansen's fifth-inning blast. Texas looks like a team that can manufacture runs from multiple spots in the lineup, and on this night, that depth was the difference.